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Thursday, June 05, 2014

The barn renovation-into-a-gîte project that, I’m
embarrassed to say, started way back in 2006, is entering its final phase. Last
Sunday, on a sunny day he should have better spent relaxing in the warm bosom
of his family, our friend Bruno generously gave up his time, his expertise and
his personal recipe to help us trowel earth plaster onto the wall between the
bedroom and the living area.

We started promptly at 9 o’clock, wetting the walls again,
tacking mesh to the inside of the doorway and then mixing riddled subsoil rich
in clay with building sand, a few handfuls of chopped up flax stalk and a mug
of flour paste. This was smeared onto the walls with a float and, when it had
dried off a little, polished with a dainty, handmade, flexible Japanese spatula.

I left Gabrielle and Bruno to go and light the barbeque. As
I approached, I heard the unmistakeable, heavy buzz of a bee swarm and looked
up to see a swirling cloud of bees. Smallholding’s a bit like that. Fully
absorbed in one task, with not a moment to spare for anything else, something
presents itself, requiring immediate attention.

Voila! One swarm, still attached to the branch.

We started the year with two healthy hives. At the beginning
of April, we opened them up to mark the queens with a spot of paint and noticed
that one colony was particularly strong. It was therefore likely to create new
queens soon although there were no queen cells at that time.

Bad weather
prevented us from looking again and the very day that we had agreed to conduct
an artificial swarm (where we control what’s happening) they beat us to it and
swarmed. Now we had three colonies. A cast swarm followed, which we failed to
collect and bee life settled down again. We had no idea that the weaker colony
had put on such a burst of fecundity and were ready to swarm.

I throw the bees onto the board

They swarmed onto the outer branch of an oak tree. I erected
a scaffold tower, made all the more difficult as I was wearing full protective
clothing on a hot day. As I got ready with loppers and pruning saw to go up and
cut the swarm down, I noticed they’d gone … into a nearby myrobalan tree. I
moved the scaffold tower and Gabrielle joined me at altitude to carefully
remove the branch to which the buzzing ball of bees was attached. I’d placed a
ramp up to the entrance of a “Nuke” (nucleus) box and with a violent shake of
the cut branch, dumped the whole lot. Seconds later, the bees started moving
upwards to the hive entrance. It’s normally the old queen—which we had marked—who leaves with the
swarm.

While I was filming, much like finding Wally, I suddenly spotted the
queen amongst the crowd, which was both exciting and reassuring that things were playing out as
they should. We watched her all the way into the hive.

Back to the barbeque, lunch, and then the afternoon earth
plastering. We now have four hives of bees and a beautiful deep orange wall.